Debunking the $12 Doritos Super Bowl commercial
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
By now everyone has seen all of the amateur Doritos Superbowl commercials that aired on Sunday’s Superbowl. One that is getting a lot of attention is Live the Flavor by Dale Backus. There are many stories going around the internet about the production cost of the spot being $12.00. The creators were even on Monday morning’s Today show talking about the $12 spot. Anyone reading this blog probably knows something about production and anyone who knows anything about production knows you can’t produce anything for $12. Not even with a Fisher Price Pixelvision Camera. It’s kind of like saying you can produce a feature film for $7,000.
The Doritos spot was produced by a production company from North Carolina called Five Point Productions. Their production experience was written about at Audio/Video Producer’s website. The $12 equals the cost of 4 bags of Doritos chips. What they are leaving out is the cost of all the gear that they already owned (and had to pay for at some point.)
- JVC GY-HD100U, 1/3-Inch 3-CCD Professional HDV Camcorder: $4,000
- Letus HD100 35mm adapter: $900
- Apple Final Cut Studio: $1,300
- MacBook Pro: $1,500
- Adobe Photoshop: $300
That’s $8,300. Not to mention the sound recording/mixing, 2D graphic creation, 3D composting, time it took to do all the work and a G5 that was mentioned in the article. I don’t want to take anything away from the spot and the creators but I think it is important to look at the real costs, especially for anyone thinking they can produce a commercial with the $12 in their pocket. The spot really was the best of all the Doritos viewer commercials and a lot better than many of the big budget spots that aired during the Super Bowl (did you see the terrible Sales Genie spot?). The spot was a clever idea and the graphic treatment of the still frames really made the spot stick in my mind. The edits that produce the driver’s face hitting the steering wheel twice are very well timed and produce a nice flow until the WHAM of the freeze frame as the driver smashes into the steering wheel. In the world of Current TV and You Tube, viewer created content can launch careers. Here’s hoping the folks of Five Point Productions can really make something of their 15 minutes. Good luck guys.
Wednesday, February 7th 2007 at 2:48 pm
Thanks a lot for your kind words about our spot. This has been a great opportunity for us and now we’re trying to figure out how to go forth with this under our belt.
We’ve had a lot of people embrace the fact we made the commercial for 12 dollars – but we’ve also had a handful of people like yourself who think it’s totally off the wall to make a claim like producing a commercial for 12 dollars. In our minds (and many others it seems) the production budget includes all costs that were inflicted as a direct result of producing the commercial. We already had the camera, computers and software to make the commercial – so even if we didn’t make the commercial we would have spent no money whatsoever. If it helps – we didn’t even buy any of the equipment we used ourselves – it was pretty much all given to us. Acting was done by members of our team, obviously for no charge, we wore what we had, nothing at all was rented and anything we used we didn’t already have was borrowed free of charge. The cars were borrowed from parents, we only shot for a totally of 8 hours over 2 days so no food was necessary during the shoots, and the shooting location was approximately two miles from where we live. We didn’t require any permits from the city or county because it wasn’t necessary – the Mayor of our city even sent us a congratulatory letter. As much as it is hard to leave it really is the way it was.
So the bottom line is, the only thing we actually had to go spend ANY money on to make the commercial was on 4 bags of chips. EVERYTHING else was either already owned or borrowed free of charge.
If this still doesn’t satisfy you, I’d love to answer any specific questions you may have.
I REALLY do appreciate the fact that you like the commercial however, and i think the day in age has come where it really is possible to (once you have the equipment) produce many quality productions at very little cost.
Thanks again,
Dale Backus
Five Point Productions
Wednesday, February 7th 2007 at 3:19 pm
Dale, thanks for the comments. I think anytime a filmmaker really sells the “microbudget” idea they are really selling just that – an idea. It is exciting to think one can make a commercial for $12 or a feature for $7000 but when you look at the reality it can’t be done. Sure you didn’t buy or rent the equipment for the shoot (and may not have had to buy it at all) but someone somewhere had to pony up that dough or the spot would never have been made. So a true budget must include that money that was spent or otherwise the production wouldn’t have been made. With that, it cost more that $12. Just like to say that Rodriguez’s El Mariachi only cost $7000, if you factor in what it took after that $7000 acquisition cost to get it to something the public could view then the budget was way more than $7000. I just did a short film. It had a $5000 budget. We shot on 16mm and 35mm film. We only spent $5000 cash but so much came from donations and people working for free that the real cost was much higher. If we hadn’t had the camera equipment and film transfer donated we never could have made the film so that must be counted in the real budget. Just like if you didn’t already have your equipment you couldn’t have made the Doritos spot. All that said it is possible to make films, shorts, commercials these days in ways in was never possible before, hence you guys having your spot shown on the Superbowl! That’s a great achievement. You should feel good in that you put a lot of the big money guys to shame.
Saturday, June 23rd 2007 at 4:07 pm
I loved your commercial! It’s the BEST ever! I am still laughing at it. so funny….